Couldn't be, Babbage never finished it, switched to the Analytical Engine (burning his government funding bridges) and never finished that either.
The subject of the article also isn't the original design, they're the No. 2 design following lessons learned working on the Analytical Engine.
Of note: on top of the two Difference Engines, the Science Museum built the printer which Babbage had designed for the Engine. Babbage had realised that many table errors came from typesetting transcription errors, so the printer was designed to produce stereotype plates, templates for mass-printing with limited room for human error.
Also contrary to what the article seems to say, Myhrvold didn't fund the first DE reconstruction. He commissioned one, and part of that commission was used to build the printer.
I believe sections of the Difference and Analytical engines were built. Not the complete project though.
I wonder if the designs could have been simplified a great deal if he had known of Turing machines or boolean math. A machine based on Turing's original idea, or something like boolfuck, probably wouldn't have too many moving parts, though it would be quite slow. I believe Boole even designed a binary calculator that just used marbles and wood seesaws.
The greatest expense with the Difference engine was the thousands of tiny mechanical parts required.
You seem to know about this, so, related question for you.
Do you think it would have greatly changed history if Babbage had succeeded at creating these mechanical computers? Or were they a vestigial dead end, and simply spreading the knowledge and theory to make them was the real extent of their influence? I'm guessing the latter, but in no way am I sure.
I don't think the machine being unfinishable was an accident of history; I think that's an accurate reflection of the phenomenal expense to create one it would have been. Given that the current techniques were largely good enough, it would have been difficult to recover that value. We are incomprehensibly richer now than society was then, it was almost certainly a great deal easier for us to build 20 years ago than it would have been for Babbage, and it still took 17 years and a lot of "drama" even so. The cost/benefit ratio just hadn't quite gone positive, or at least, not positive enough, yet.
Have you read the book "The Difference Engine" by Gibson and Sterling? (Kind of what kicked off the whole Steampunk genre). Basically a taste of modern society could have been realized many decades earlier.
But the real bummer, is that Edison's lab essentially invented vacuum tubes, but shelved it as Edison didn't see any profit potential in it. Another missed opportunity for earlier computing.
I did read the novel, but that's a work of fiction though whose primary purpose is to be enjoyable to read. I don't think it's particularly useful here.
I think so. The difference engine was a century ahead of it's time, but there wasn't anything in the way to prevent technology from developing earlier.
If it had not only been successful, but caught on, people would have quickly made improvements, invented the idea of Turing machines and general purpose computers, Boolean logic, more efficient gates, etc. You could even have had transistors being invented in the 1800s! Who knows how far it could have gotten.
Most of the early electronic computers didn't change the world, they only prefigured the chances and mechanical computers I think wouldn't have been able to come through (you can't really make a mechanical home computer or smartphone).
On the other hand, they would have provided computing power almost a century before electronic computers, who knows what roads could have been taken that weren't open to us with the power of human computers?
Couldn't be, Babbage never finished it, switched to the Analytical Engine (burning his government funding bridges) and never finished that either.
The subject of the article also isn't the original design, they're the No. 2 design following lessons learned working on the Analytical Engine.
Of note: on top of the two Difference Engines, the Science Museum built the printer which Babbage had designed for the Engine. Babbage had realised that many table errors came from typesetting transcription errors, so the printer was designed to produce stereotype plates, templates for mass-printing with limited room for human error.
Also contrary to what the article seems to say, Myhrvold didn't fund the first DE reconstruction. He commissioned one, and part of that commission was used to build the printer.